Anders Tegnell

From spring through to early autumn international media coverage of Sweden s handling of the COVID-19 crisis ebbed from lukewarm to apathetic. A mixture of praise and condemnation focused on rising and falling case and death rates, tragedy versus success, and the merits of suppression versus mitigation. Many journalists and influencers sitting in their cosy offices in New York, London, and Paris once lauded the success of the Swedish strategy, without any real investigation. International media rarely questioned Swedish media sources nor the Swedish Public Health Authority s (FHM) questionable claims around the perceived COVID-19 miracle in Sweden. In the middle of the pandemic, Swedish media received a government bailout to the tune of 700 million SEK or approximately 70 million Euro. This was at a time when front-line workers were denied oral protection as Anders Tegnell did not think it was necessary, and most elderly care homes were devoid of oxygen supplies. As the chief architect of Sweden s COVID-19 response, he has largely avoided national and international scrutiny for his costly mistakes. The question firmly on many people s minds is how did Tegnell ascend the throne in pandemic Sweden? Even in early March as many countries scrambled to prepare for the onslaught of an unknown pandemic, Tegnell’s theories and assumptions started to unravel. It became abundantly clear just how out of his depth he was and how extraordinarily little science was involved when calculating his responses. “(It) is quite a lot compared to what we have had before but compared to all the people that have gone to Italy, the chance for individuals to get it, is still very very low. All cases in Sweden have mild symptoms of the disease. The public health agency believes they have so far broken the chain of transmission from all cases in Sweden” — Interview in English. In the space of three weeks, most of his assumptions about COVID-19 and its potential impact on Sweden were proven incorrect and started to come unstuck. But his popularity grew and grew as did his perseverance. Valuable time was lost in preparing Sweden for a deadly pandemic but Tegnell s un-scientific assumptions and theories continued to prevail. And international media lapped up his theories, treating his statements as fact, with a smidgeon of wishful thinking, that there was indeed an alternative way to tackle this deadly virus. Even in late February, as the pandemic began to take a stranglehold in Italy, Tegnell s first response was that the Corona Virus would not come to Sweden. When COVID-19 hit the shores of Sweden he quickly responded by stating that there was a limited number of cases, the majority of which had come from abroad. He boasted to media outlets that there was no community spread in Sweden. But again, the pendulum swung precariously back and forth until it swung completely against him as community spread was identified in Stockholm, Sörmland, and Östra Götaland. Again, Tegnell was ready with an implausible response; that it was confined to these three areas. Within a matter of days Tegnell had to capitulate that there was community spread in all but a handful of sparsely populated regions in Sweden. This gamble proved costly. At the end of April, a young Nurse Marielle DeBruhl (39) tragically lost her life to COVID-19 as she worked on the front lines caring for corona-infected patients without PPE. International media and influencers have largely failed to cover the ethical and moral bankruptcy of the Swedish strategy focusing primarily on the socio-economic and political angles of Sweden s handling of the pandemic. Thousands of elderly have been neglected and most have been denied access to health care. Most troubling of all is many seniors have been handed out death sentences in the form of a shot of morphine, left to die alone in their care homes, often on instruction from a medical expert over the phone. Neither patient nor family were ever consulted.